Although this is easily fixed, the type system does not enforce the correct solution. Even worse, if you use the former code, it won't even raise an error – it will just fail silently and return an empty string. Many years passed before a satisfactory solution to the streaming data problem was found.

2 How iteratees work

When you "step" an iteratee, it reads a chunk of data, updates the internal state and returns a new iteratee along with the data it read. Because an iteratee is simply a function with state, many iteratees can be composed together to form a pipeline.

Some implementations also provide a resource management layer that releases resources automatically when they are no longer needed. This is very useful in a server, where sockets and file handles are scarce.